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The Romance Genre 2/4: A Brief History of Romance Publishing

In the previous post I explained the reason behind the popularity of romance novels. In this post I explore the history of romance
publishing - how it started. Please note, this post is not about the history of romance writing but about the history or romance publishing. For those of you who are interested in the history of romance writing I attach to this post a lecture on the subject. I end this post with information and links
for people who want to submit their romantic stories to publishers.

Milestones in
the History of Romance Publishing

Mills & Boon publishing house was established in 1908 in the
UK. They started as a general publishing company, which brought out the work of
authors such as Agatha Christie and Jack London, that also published
romantic fiction.

Over the years the firm noticed
that their romantic fiction was in more demand than all the other genres. In
the 1930s Mills & Boon moved to publishing solely romance.

In the late 1950s, after noticing
the success of Mills & Boon
romances, the Canadian publishing company Harlequin
Books began publishing Milles &
Boon books in North America as Harlequin Romances.

In 1971 the Canadian company Harlequin Enterprise merged with Mills & Boon.

Between 1970-1976 Harlequin used Simon & Schuster to distribute their romance novels in the USA.

In the mid 70’s Harlequin noticed that the American
readers were tired of the English romances of Mills & Boon. American readers demanded love stories with American
protagonists and also contained more sexual content than what the English
authors provided. To answer the demand Harlequin published Janet Dailey’s
romances. Her stories took place in the US, had American protagonists (many cowboys), and were more sexual than the naive English romances. Harlequin rejected the
manuscripts of Nora Roberts (later a
top seller author), claiming that they already had their American romance
writer.

In 1980 Simon & Schuster formed Silhouette
Romance (to use the distribution infrastructure they had for Harlequin). Silhouette'sromance novelsbecame very popular; they provided
American readers what they had been looking for – juicier American romances.

Today Harlequin publishes more than 110 titles a month in 34 languages in
110 international markets on six continents. It is the world's leading
publisher of books for women. In 2012 there were 92 Harlequin titles for a combined total of 313 weeks on the New York
Times bestseller list along with four titles achieving the coveted #1 position.
Since its inception, Harlequin has
sold approximately 6.28 billion books.

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